The present invention relates in general to a method and an apparatus for removing heat generated in a rotary disk by transferring the heat to a heat sink in the proximity thereof.
The waste heat in any solid state laser medium often causes uncorrectable phase aberration in the path of the laser beam due to thermal and stress induced refractive index change. It imposes fundamental limitation on brightness of a conventional continuous-wave or quasi continuous-wave solid state laser in which the gain medium is stationary. Such problem is unavoidable and cannot be fully corrected by application of adaptive optics without causing significant power loss. The traditional design elements which control the performance of high-brightness solid state lasers include properties and shape of the gain medium, the optical pump source, and the mode of pumping and laser power extraction. Some other design considerations are phase locking of independent lasers, intermittent laser operation, and use of beam correction technologies. As mentioned above, the brightness of all these designs is limited by the uncorrectable phase aberration caused by increasing temperature.